<div><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/28/campbell.brown.obama/index.html?eref=rss_topstories#cnnSTCText">http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/28/campbell.brown.obama/index.html?eref=rss_topstories#cnnSTCText</a></div>
<div>
<h1><font size="2">Commentary: Obama breaks promise on campaign finance</font><br></h1></div>
<div class="gmail_quote"> </div>
<div class="gmail_quote">2 Interesting snipits from this article:</div>
<div class="gmail_quote">"One year ago, Obama made a promise. He pledged to accept public financing and to work with the Republican nominee to ensure that they both operated within those limits."</div>
<div class="gmail_quote">"Just to throw a number out: Obama has raised well over $600 million since the start of his campaign, close to what George Bush and John Kerry raised combined in 2004."</div>
<div class="gmail_quote"> </div>
<div class="gmail_quote">Nice liberal spending... doesn't sound like middle class concern there.</div>
<div class="gmail_quote">~Lance</div>
<div class="gmail_quote"> </div>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 6:23 PM, Discussion of the Good, Clean Funnies List <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:gcfl-discuss@gcfl.net">gcfl-discuss@gcfl.net</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">
<div>
<div></div>
<div>Before I click on my Juno dial-up to check what has been going on in the discussion group for the past 24 hours...</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Now that it is NOT 11:00 pm, and I do NOT have to be up at 5:30 am to drive a ten hour bus route...</div>
<div> </div>
<div>I am going to do a more thorough factual dissection of Miss Melanie's hysterical moment...</div>
<div> </div>
<div>She begins with broad sweeping reference to <font color="#ffff00">"the madness that's been on display since 9/11 itself, when swathes of the UK population decided that 'America had it coming to it'
<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>because it supported Israel, and that George W Bush was the most dangerous<br></div>man on the planet." </font>Leaving aside that the main reason I do not consider George W. Bush the most dangerous man on the planet is because he lacks competence to match his ambition, there are indeed people, on both sides of the Atlantic, who answer to the above description. Barack Obama is not one of them, and never has been.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Most of these people are my age or older, not Obama's age or younger. They have spent much of their lives criticizing the government of the United States for real and imagined abuses of power. They have not gotten it through their heads that if Osama bin-Laden ever achieved the world-wide emirate to which he aspires, they would be first in line to have their heads chopped off. (Al Qaeda is NOT a plucky little guerilla outfit trying to save indigenous peoples from capitalist exploitation. And Osama does NOT like liberals at all.) Fortunately, these people are few, marginal, and without significant influence. Their main function, aside from contemplating each other's political navels, is to serve as a foil for articles like this one.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>So Phillips is already indulging in deception which rivals that of Joseph Goebbels (repeat a lie often enough, and people will believe it), to present this as an analysis of the significance of Obama's probable impending election. It is rather as if I exclaimed that men cheating on their wives undermines the integrity of marriage, and is unfair to their children (both true statements) then followed up with "So how could you possibly be friends with greenBubble?" I have NO reason to believe that greenBubble has ever been unfaithful to his wife. In fact, it is statistically unlikely, because that is indeed very rare among Orthodox Jews. Very rare. But this unlikely to libelous insinuation has about the same relationship to my concern for family values, as Obama's election has to the foolishness which Phillips waves to begin her petty tirade.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Then Miss Melanie goes on to condemn <font color="#ffff00">"that media class which, in
<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>refusing to tell the public what it needs to know about Barack Obama, may<br>now finally install in the White House the man who personifies the<br></div>repudiation of the American power and western values..." </font>as demonstrated by <font color="#ffff00">"the lack
<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side -- or worse, actively<br>serving as attack dogs for the presidential ticket of Sens. Barack Obama,<br>D-Ill., and Joe Biden, D-Del."</div></font></div>
<div> </div>
<div>All the specific instances Phillips refers to have in fact been intensively covered. I've read about them in TIME magazine, and when I check the NY TIMES web site, there they are again. Articles about the allegations, articles about what the pundits say about the allegations, articles about how the allegations are affecting voters' choices... </div>
<div> </div>
<div>Voters don't really care, and that is what infuriates anyone who desperately wants voters to NOT elect Obama. He was quite upfront about his grad school drug use, he could hardly deny it, having mentioned it in two best selling books. What little there is to say about Obama's ties to Rezko have been dredged up over and over. Everyone knows all about Jeremiah Wright. It hasn't had the impact that the Swift Vote Beterans think they had on John Kerry. (I don't believe they had much impact at all -- Kerry was so lame he would have lost anyway, but he played right into that kind of innuendo.)</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Then there is <font color="#ffff00">"Joe the Plumber. Middle America, even
<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>when they didn't agree with Joe, looked on in horror as the press took apart<br>the private life of an average person who had the temerity to ask a tough<br>question of a presidential candidate. So much for the standing up for the<br>
</div>little man."</font> Making Joe larger than life was the miniscule right-wing bridge club's last hope for an icon that would make a laughing-stock of Obama, and it flopped. I've read plenty of media coverage. They played up his question, Obama's answer, everything McCain made out of it. The press took apart his private life? I don't think so. I haven't read anything about his divorce, his hypothetical love affairs, what church he belongs to, what his pastor preaches on Sunday, what sports he enjoys, what he drinks, whether he uses drugs for recreational purposes... none of that. I have read analysis of the company he wants to buy, its revenues and expenses, which strongly suggest that he will get a net tax CUT under Obama's plan, not an increase. It is all about the difference between gross revenues and net profit. The current owner of the company (Joe's boss) doesn't take home $268,000, the company takes in that much revenue, out of which rent or mortgage, truck payments and maintenance, supplies, parts, tools, utilities, etc. are deducted (and tax deductible on a Schedule C -- I know because at a much smaller level I also fill out a Schedule C). I have also read brief mention of the Plumber's Union claiming that Joe is not licensed by the State of Ohio, which does require plumbers to have a license.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>As to the "criminal fundraising" -- there is nothing in the way of decent footnotes or evidence. "The gentleman who started the ball rolling" is not even named. IF a campaign as smooth and sophisticated as Obama's intended to collect campaign donations beyond the legal limit from a wealthy donor, can anyone tell me any reason it would carefully suspend standard security, monitoring and compliance procedures to accept donations <em><strong>under the cover names Phillips cites? </strong></em>Wouldn't anyone with half a brain prefer these illegal donations to be in the names of John Smith, Curtis Jones, Albert Hutchinson and Jerry Lee Briggs?</div>
<div> </div>
<div>The whole accusation sounds like a set-up or a con job to me.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Rashid Kalidi, whatever else he may be, is not a candidate for a post in the Obama cabinet. I have friends from high school who were members of Young Americans for Freedom. I would hate to run for office and find myself accused in a liberal-leaning district of sharing every tenet of their beliefs. I'm not sure why Phillips bothers. If voters have by and large been able to distinguish between a candidate and his ex-pastor, a candidate and someone who sat on the same board, a candidate and someone who once held a living room fundraiser for him, why wouldn't voters be unable to distinguish between what Obama's policies will be and what someone he has had valued conversations with might advocate in circles that are certainly not connected to the United States government?</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Incidentally, I could see some distinct parallels between Zionist settlers on the west bank and Osama bin Laden, just as I see parallels between the loud minority of Christians who want their particular view of "Christian politics" to become the dominant power in the United States and Osama bin Laden. I have read articles reporting from Israel, in which <em><strong>west bank settlers who were active in religious parties in Israel told the reporter</strong></em> that they have more in common with Islamic fundamentalists than they do with secular or reformed Jews! Please, let's leave some room for discussion, without concluding that every word you listen to with some degree of respect becomes a hallmark of what you would do if elected to high office!!!</div>
<div> </div>
<div>ACORN: The main reason that either government authorities or the media have information about fraud in ACORN's voter-registration efforts is that ACORN meticulously checks the paperwork before turning it in, caught and reported most fraud itself, and dealt promptly with any other questionable registrations brought to its attention after they were turned in. There literally is NO story there. ACORN, like many voter registration campaigns, hired people, who were generally down and out and needed the money (because the rest of us are working at the jobs we already have), and made the common mistake of paying them by the registrant. The inducement to make up names is obvious. These street workers are largely NOT committed by principle or inspiration, they just want to make some money. Most do it honestly, and may even appreciate what they are doing. Some are not honest, and they are fired as that becomes clear.</div>
<div> </div>
<div><font color="#ffff00">
<div class="Ih2E3d">"Over the past seven years, the media has created the Big Lie that America is<br></div>the biggest rogue state in the world, with Israel its proxy." </font>Nonsense. Only in Melanie Phillips's overactive imagination. Show me a collection of articles in any daily print of broadcast media, any widely subscribed and commercially viable weekly magazine, which makes any such case. It is simply not true. You have to dredge up obscure monthlies published by tiny little ideological organs infatuated with a sense of their own importance to find such warped perspectives.</div>
<div> </div>
<div><font color="#ffff00">
<div class="Ih2E3d">"Now it is ensuring that a man who will act on that very premise to crush America and<br></div>destroy Israel will be placed in the White House to do so." </font>Yeah, right. Colin Powell and Christopher Buckley are dupes of a messianic cult??? Keep in mind that a sometime associate of Ayers and Dohrn in SDS, although NOT a member of Weather Underground, Tom Hayden, currently a state senator from California, told a reporter "we're trying to encourage people to vote for Obama, but it doesn't help that he wants to step up the war in Afghanistan and go after Osama bin Laden." That is the real picture. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>The only menace going on is the very realistic fears of Melanie Phillips, Ann Coulter, and all their cohorts that their own little reign of error is about to end, because voters indeed are not buying the ludicrous smear campaigns they have been running for the past twenty years or so. Incidentallly, they have become well known and widely read precisely because those big bad media outlets they love to kick have given them so much coverage and lucrative publishing contracts.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Siarlys</div></div><font face="Times-New-Roman" size="2"><br><br>____________________________________________________________ <br><a href="http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2142/fc/Ioyw6i3nfvZfFoNaz9Wn2pLj1Xz4Yke8aksYPlXcWaaRGWviorHbxK/" target="_blank">Can't pay your bills? Click here to learn about filing for bankruptcy.</a></font><br>
<br>_______________________________________________<br>GCFL-discuss mailing list<br><a href="mailto:GCFL-discuss@gcfl.net">GCFL-discuss@gcfl.net</a><br><a href="http://gcfl.net/mailman/listinfo/gcfl-discuss" target="_blank">http://gcfl.net/mailman/listinfo/gcfl-discuss</a><br>
<br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>No animals were harmed in the sending of this message.<br>However, a few million electrons were extremely inconvenienced...<br>